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This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backe

This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin too. Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain?

jedimastert 5y ago
So, like, I get what you're saying, but I feel like you didn't actually look past the title of the post. This isn't governments censoring information or whatever, it's a form you can fill out to request removal of coerced personal information like revenge porn or doxxing.
- dkokelley 5y ago
  I understand what the post is saying. I see this as an example of censorship (by Google in this case) being a GOOD thing. This caused me to wonder about how a decentralized platform would handle similar circumstances.
  - jedimastert 5y ago
    Whelp color me an ass for commenting about not reading past the headline while also completely missing the main crux of your argument! That's my b
narrator 5y ago
When talking about the blockchain and other voluntary systems, I tend to look at these things from a "what if there was no government that could just use physical coercion to implement its laws, how would you get people to voluntarily sign up for this?" perspective for these kinds of problems. You would get users to sign the social contract with some online entity and that entity would censor the blockchain for their ideological/legal jurisdiction. For example, you could sign the Christian fundamentalist social contract and have all blasphemy removed from your search results. In exchange, you would receive community support, access to their content, etc. If they found out you were browsing blasphemous material they would revoke the particular social contract you signed. Just spitballing here, but I wonder if the nofap guys could start something like this to block all nsfw content on whatever distributed blockchain thing was out there. Then they could offer some special forum as a benefit. You could use a DAO for governance conflicts, etc.
- pjc50 5y ago
  That doesn't (and can't) prevent revenge porn or blackmail or doxxing in any way, because the victim is not a party.
  - narrator 5y ago
    Obviously you can use courts and the police in the form of the existing government. That works fine. We're trying to figure out how to do this in a borderless global internet via blockchain and so forth. The victim would contact the organizations and ask that they remove the material citing their mission and bylaws. Maybe they would form a hierarchy with the most generally agreed upon rules being shared, like a treaty, between blockchains.
kypro 5y ago
IMO both of these options are terrible. I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take. What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place. The problem we have today is that there are too many foreign companies deciding what we can and can't say or do. Crypto has the exact opposite problem, but unless our governments step up and regulates these companies in the interests of the public our only option (if you don't agree with the censorship) is to create something uncensorable.
- dkokelley 5y ago
  I appreciate this response! I agree that a legal process seems to be the best solution (so far) to collectively deciding what is and isn't ok. The legal system has its own faults of course. It's administered by fallible governments and can have individual bad actors. But could a legal system expect to exert control over a decentralized system like a blockchain? Put another way, if there was a "crypto twitter" clone, and someone posted revenge porn or personal information about someone (home address, let's say), wouldn't that post be forever embedded into the blockchain? Would a legal system ever be able to remove it?
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    It may not be able to remove it, but it certainly can make viewing, storing or disseminating it illegal and punish those that do. Ultimately a legal system is how a society controls a governments monopoly on violence. A legal system can remove almost anything if it really want too, by virtue of the fact that it can send big men with guns to destroy whatever physical manifestations of the thing exists. Of course there are practical limits to this power. But that’s never stopped a government before.
  - 5y ago
shakezula 5y ago
Google is not backed by a blockchain. And as someone who has worked in the blockchain space for a long time, it’s pretty much unanimously agreed in the space that the cost of inevitably protecting bad actors is worth the value in protecting good actors. Good and bad are subjective there, but for better or worse the blockchain isn’t.
lozaning 5y ago
I freaked a bunch of FBI agents out a while back by Base64 encoding a photo of an FBI logo and writing that to the Eth chain. They have massive concerns around this regarding data exfiltration. The cost of removing the data, once written to a chain, is essentially equal to the market cap of the coin for that chain.
- CDRdude 5y ago
  I don’t understand. Why did this freak out a bunch of FBI agents?
  - gninazol 5y ago
    Are you asking why it freaked out real FBI agents or the ones in lozaning's imagination? The FBI doesn't give a single damn hoot about "data exfiltration" via blockchain metadata. Anyone with half an understanding of any of those terms knows what an absurd implication that is. For concerns about "data exfiltration", discussing blockchain doesn't even make a single damn bit of sense. Blockchain is about impermanence and publishing, not about "exfiltration". I'm not sure which is more amusing, thinking that the FBI would give a hoot about b64-encoded data in the metadata of a transaction, or that this person wrote that comment on HN to try and seem cool. LOL, what, the FBI reached out to them (how?/why? nothing about this makes sense)?
  - lozaning 5y ago
    Because the data is there _forever_ and there's not really anything they can do about it, which stands in stark contrast to how they're used to operating. There is no person they can throw in jail, no corporation that can be sued, no servers that can be seized, domains taken over, etc, that will result in that data no longer being available to those that know where to look for it. The data just remains online until such a time that the coins of a given chain are worth $0.0 and coin holders no longer have a financial incentive to keep the ledger online. FWIW the ones I talked to where more of the door kicking variety, not the 'cyber' type.
    - int_19h 5y ago
ipaddr 5y ago
You don't undo a harm by trying to erase it. If the porn has been created/recorded the ex has a copy and could upload it to non-block chain locations. Once he shares it it has been decentralized. There was never a way to undo porn video you made when you were younger.
- afavour 5y ago
  The internet is incomprehensibly vast. Yes, there might be a copy (or multiple copies) of a video you made in your youth on the internet. But as long as it isn't a) prominently available and b) attached to your name, you might be OK. The situation we have today does allow you to address such a problem: Google can remove search results. It's not possible to do that on the blockchain.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    The blockchain is vast and growing. Discovery is difficult. Google prevents new searches or tries to but if you have the link you can visit without google. Same as the blockchain you would need to know where to look.
- summerlight 5y ago
  But still you can try making it harder to access by cutting the major distribution channels, which perhaps will significantly reduce its propagation velocity. With whatever technologies that refuse to fix this issue, you cannot. This is a critical difference for law enforcement.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    You wouldn't stop a torrent. Why should the blockchain be different Discovery still happens elsewhere.
- pjc50 5y ago
  You can't 100% undo it, but you can criminalize distribution. Uploading it to a system from which it cannot be deleted guarantees no leniency.
gninazol 5y ago
Always good to rehash the same exact conversation over and over for ... 13 years now. Can we at least pretend to learn something from every other time this exact conversation has played out? No? We're just gonna relitigate it all from scratch again - relearning the same naive lessons over and over? (Shockingly people in this space do indeed understand the implications of censorship-resistant platforms.)
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
I'd love to walk into a business without shoes or a shirt and demand service. For some crazy reason these businesses are allowed to restrict my liberty on their property.
- dkokelley 5y ago
  I guess I'm thinking more about a "decentralized Google" where it's impossible to remove things like revenge porn. Is there anything we can/should do about that potential?
  - sneak 5y ago
    You mean, anyone's web index that they created outside of Google? Indexing the web is an old tradition.
    - dkokelley 5y ago
      Not quite, the analogy breaks down here… discoverability vs. accessibility is different. Both contribute to the distribution of content. Google solves one part of that equation, but I’m referring to total decentralized distribution.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Having your access restricted based on readily-remedied conditions, based on consideration for the common weal, or to one of numerous potential suppliers or vendors, is different from access restrictions based on flat-out retaliation, intimidation, coercion, historic social discriminatory bases, and/or to the sole, overwhelming majority, or most attractive (low cost, convenience, features, compatibility/interactivity) provider. The "private business right of refusal" argument has some merits, but also substantial equity and justice problems.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Running through some stale tabs, gumby makes pretty much the same point a few days ago regards a flatfile addressbook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27442335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27442335
kr99x 5y ago
No, no information should ever be banned from any public/commons - the end. You want to ban certain information from a particular place you control? Go nuts. The wider public? No. The power to ban information is too great to be entrusted to any authority at all. Depending on how thorough the "ban" (web text filter at the ISP level? mandatory AR implants at birth filtering banned content? worse?), it's anywhere from an abhorrent violation of human rights and the principles behind free exchange and scientific inquiry all the way up through literally the most powerful weapon which could even theoretically be designed. This is not a road worth going down, for any amount of harm reduction. The cost today may be worth it. The cost long term is potentially too great to even consider risking. There is no guarantee of who holds the ban hammer tomorrow.
- dkokelley 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Do you think there is ever a scenario where information should be censored from the public at large? (Child porn, or you or your family getting ‘doxxed’, for example) I appreciate the take that the future harm isn’t worth the benefit today, since we’d enable future arbiters to control what is available. There’s nuance in determining what is a public sphere vs. a privately controlled platform. The places with the most distribution are currently private, but crypto could change that to where we collectively own the platform, effectively making it publicly owned. Does that change your thoughts on when censorship is appropriate?
  - mcbits 5y ago
    Nobody ever argued that molecules of air and ink have some duty to participate in enforcing laws prohibiting various types of speech and the press, I guess because it was never possible. Bits and bytes are rapidly supplanting ink and air for many types of communication, and they do make it possible to censor those communications at a deeper level than ever before. So I guess the question is, how does the use of this new power to suppress abuses of speech weigh against other forms of abuse that become available to those who wield this power?
  - kr99x 5y ago
    I think there's lots of information that should be censored, and if I were made data czar of the world I would surely not be corrupt and do a diligent and thoughtful job removing only what must be removed for the good of the world. But I would not trust any corporation (sometimes it's profitable to remove something so they retain control of some market) or government (sometimes it secures their power to keep people unaware of some facts about their actions) to do the same. Would you?
summerlight 5y ago
To add more data points for your point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case Everyone, please DO NOT underestimate people's malicious will to abuse weak minority groups having un-moderated platforms as their primary tool. Due to lack of Telegram's basic moderation, those victims had been severely abused to the unrecoverable level, more than two years. This could've been at least mitigated if they simply closed the room based on user reporting, which they refused to do so.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
meekmind 5y ago
> The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin Do they? Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Having a centralized arbiter of truth is more dangerous to the truth than bad people who do bad things.
- devenblake 5y ago
  > Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either. Tell that to folks doing web archival.
  - meekmind 5y ago
    They're both distributed. The fact that anyone _can_ archive anything forever reasonably excludes the assumption that it's not, accessibility/curation notwithstanding.
throwitaway1235 5y ago
It's simple. The user is a thinking, conscious being, he or she views, what he or she wants. No dilemma. Nothing shall be censored.
- anamexis 5y ago
  So if someone posts revenge porn of you, you're fine just trusting the 8 billion people on Earth not to look at it, and leaving it at that?
jazzyjackson 5y ago
> How does that work on a blockchain? Since none of us are the operator in the matrix, we're not looking at the raw bytes of the blockchain, we're always using some view layer over the data. So the view layer can choose to not see the content of some block. This could be done by having community operated blocklists to the effect of "you don't want to know what's at these locations" - you can't take back what's been said on chain, but you can cover your ears.
foxrider 5y ago
The honest answer here is that I don't trust any authority to be the "authority on information" and to be able to decide what I may or may not be able to see. I expect the search engine to be a search engine and not an "allowed material" repository. History shows that an authority on anything would be abused sooner or later and if you live in a totalitarian country the technical ability to censor information is the last thing you want anyone having
concordDance 5y ago
> Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain? My answer is No. The "genuinely harmful content" is minimally harmful compared to the damage censorship can do. The problem is always with people being dicks, not the information. E.g. a jilted lover posting porn videoes of an ex is only a problem because the lover will deliberately attempt to show them to the ex and the ex's social contacts (and even that is only harmful because some people are judgemental bastards. Yes, some people like scat, get over it), so target the lover with harassment charges rather than making the information distribution illegal. I'm a bit of a freedom of information purist, I think a world with 0 censorship would be better than the current one, as the censors will always be tempted to censor more and more things to advance their interests. The maximum badness from zero censorship is much much lower than the maximum badness with censorship.
- poutrathor 5y ago
  what is lacking in your view is empathy. It seems you don't understand what it is to be the victim, for no good damn fault of you. Moreover in your 'solution', once the videos have leaked on-line to fulfil the ex-lover revenge, it will never be taken out. Fast forward 10 years later, the ex-lover has served its sentence, the victim moved to another place, another job, every thing is forgotten. At their work, they got into a heated debate about any topic. The adversarial debater, seeing red, searched the web, find the video and broadcast to everybody. There might be regrets the second after sending, but it's too late, *once again* It's not about people being dicks it's about information as weapons laying around forever. Humans have built-in forgetness but modern days tech does not. Since we are evolving at nature rate, technology must be rein in from time to time.
  - concordDance 5y ago
    I admit I do struggle to understand that type of victimhood. Probably because my social circle would not care about whatever obscure fetishes I have unless it's kiddy diddling, nor would most even want to see my sex tape (and I'd struggle to care if they had). However, people are quite capable of being very unpleasant to eachother without sex videos, if it wasn't that the person seeing red would have done something else (keyed car, sabotage, malicious lies... plenty of options). Regardless they should be disciplined, probably fired outright.
mikestaub 5y ago
Mastodon handles this almost perfectly. No one can take down an ActivityPub server, but moderators can choose to not sync with hostile actors. If the users disagree with the moderator's decision, they migrate to another host and take all their data with them.

jedimastert 5y ago

So, like, I get what you're saying, but I feel like you didn't actually look past the title of the post. This isn't governments censoring information or whatever, it's a form you can fill out to request removal of coerced personal information like revenge porn or doxxing.

dkokelley 5y ago
I understand what the post is saying. I see this as an example of censorship (by Google in this case) being a GOOD thing. This caused me to wonder about how a decentralized platform would handle similar circumstances.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  Whelp color me an ass for commenting about not reading past the headline while also completely missing the main crux of your argument! That's my b

narrator 5y ago

When talking about the blockchain and other voluntary systems, I tend to look at these things from a "what if there was no government that could just use physical coercion to implement its laws, how would you get people to voluntarily sign up for this?" perspective for these kinds of problems. You would get users to sign the social contract with some online entity and that entity would censor the blockchain for their ideological/legal jurisdiction. For example, you could sign the Christian fundamentalist social contract and have all blasphemy removed from your search results. In exchange, you would receive community support, access to their content, etc. If they found out you were browsing blasphemous material they would revoke the particular social contract you signed. Just spitballing here, but I wonder if the nofap guys could start something like this to block all nsfw content on whatever distributed blockchain thing was out there. Then they could offer some special forum as a benefit. You could use a DAO for governance conflicts, etc.

pjc50 5y ago
That doesn't (and can't) prevent revenge porn or blackmail or doxxing in any way, because the victim is not a party.
- narrator 5y ago
  Obviously you can use courts and the police in the form of the existing government. That works fine. We're trying to figure out how to do this in a borderless global internet via blockchain and so forth. The victim would contact the organizations and ask that they remove the material citing their mission and bylaws. Maybe they would form a hierarchy with the most generally agreed upon rules being shared, like a treaty, between blockchains.

kypro 5y ago

IMO both of these options are terrible. I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take. What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place. The problem we have today is that there are too many foreign companies deciding what we can and can't say or do. Crypto has the exact opposite problem, but unless our governments step up and regulates these companies in the interests of the public our only option (if you don't agree with the censorship) is to create something uncensorable.

dkokelley 5y ago
I appreciate this response! I agree that a legal process seems to be the best solution (so far) to collectively deciding what is and isn't ok. The legal system has its own faults of course. It's administered by fallible governments and can have individual bad actors. But could a legal system expect to exert control over a decentralized system like a blockchain? Put another way, if there was a "crypto twitter" clone, and someone posted revenge porn or personal information about someone (home address, let's say), wouldn't that post be forever embedded into the blockchain? Would a legal system ever be able to remove it?
- avianlyric 5y ago
  It may not be able to remove it, but it certainly can make viewing, storing or disseminating it illegal and punish those that do. Ultimately a legal system is how a society controls a governments monopoly on violence. A legal system can remove almost anything if it really want too, by virtue of the fact that it can send big men with guns to destroy whatever physical manifestations of the thing exists. Of course there are practical limits to this power. But that’s never stopped a government before.
- 5y ago

shakezula 5y ago

Google is not backed by a blockchain. And as someone who has worked in the blockchain space for a long time, it’s pretty much unanimously agreed in the space that the cost of inevitably protecting bad actors is worth the value in protecting good actors. Good and bad are subjective there, but for better or worse the blockchain isn’t.

lozaning 5y ago

I freaked a bunch of FBI agents out a while back by Base64 encoding a photo of an FBI logo and writing that to the Eth chain. They have massive concerns around this regarding data exfiltration. The cost of removing the data, once written to a chain, is essentially equal to the market cap of the coin for that chain.

CDRdude 5y ago
I don’t understand. Why did this freak out a bunch of FBI agents?
- gninazol 5y ago
  Are you asking why it freaked out real FBI agents or the ones in lozaning's imagination? The FBI doesn't give a single damn hoot about "data exfiltration" via blockchain metadata. Anyone with half an understanding of any of those terms knows what an absurd implication that is. For concerns about "data exfiltration", discussing blockchain doesn't even make a single damn bit of sense. Blockchain is about impermanence and publishing, not about "exfiltration". I'm not sure which is more amusing, thinking that the FBI would give a hoot about b64-encoded data in the metadata of a transaction, or that this person wrote that comment on HN to try and seem cool. LOL, what, the FBI reached out to them (how?/why? nothing about this makes sense)?
- lozaning 5y ago
  Because the data is there _forever_ and there's not really anything they can do about it, which stands in stark contrast to how they're used to operating. There is no person they can throw in jail, no corporation that can be sued, no servers that can be seized, domains taken over, etc, that will result in that data no longer being available to those that know where to look for it. The data just remains online until such a time that the coins of a given chain are worth $0.0 and coin holders no longer have a financial incentive to keep the ledger online. FWIW the ones I talked to where more of the door kicking variety, not the 'cyber' type.
  - int_19h 5y ago

ipaddr 5y ago

You don't undo a harm by trying to erase it. If the porn has been created/recorded the ex has a copy and could upload it to non-block chain locations. Once he shares it it has been decentralized. There was never a way to undo porn video you made when you were younger.

afavour 5y ago
The internet is incomprehensibly vast. Yes, there might be a copy (or multiple copies) of a video you made in your youth on the internet. But as long as it isn't a) prominently available and b) attached to your name, you might be OK. The situation we have today does allow you to address such a problem: Google can remove search results. It's not possible to do that on the blockchain.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The blockchain is vast and growing. Discovery is difficult. Google prevents new searches or tries to but if you have the link you can visit without google. Same as the blockchain you would need to know where to look.
summerlight 5y ago
But still you can try making it harder to access by cutting the major distribution channels, which perhaps will significantly reduce its propagation velocity. With whatever technologies that refuse to fix this issue, you cannot. This is a critical difference for law enforcement.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You wouldn't stop a torrent. Why should the blockchain be different Discovery still happens elsewhere.
pjc50 5y ago
You can't 100% undo it, but you can criminalize distribution. Uploading it to a system from which it cannot be deleted guarantees no leniency.

gninazol 5y ago

Always good to rehash the same exact conversation over and over for ... 13 years now. Can we at least pretend to learn something from every other time this exact conversation has played out? No? We're just gonna relitigate it all from scratch again - relearning the same naive lessons over and over? (Shockingly people in this space do indeed understand the implications of censorship-resistant platforms.)

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

I'd love to walk into a business without shoes or a shirt and demand service. For some crazy reason these businesses are allowed to restrict my liberty on their property.

dkokelley 5y ago
I guess I'm thinking more about a "decentralized Google" where it's impossible to remove things like revenge porn. Is there anything we can/should do about that potential?
- sneak 5y ago
  You mean, anyone's web index that they created outside of Google? Indexing the web is an old tradition.
  - dkokelley 5y ago
    Not quite, the analogy breaks down here… discoverability vs. accessibility is different. Both contribute to the distribution of content. Google solves one part of that equation, but I’m referring to total decentralized distribution.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Having your access restricted based on readily-remedied conditions, based on consideration for the common weal, or to one of numerous potential suppliers or vendors, is different from access restrictions based on flat-out retaliation, intimidation, coercion, historic social discriminatory bases, and/or to the sole, overwhelming majority, or most attractive (low cost, convenience, features, compatibility/interactivity) provider. The "private business right of refusal" argument has some merits, but also substantial equity and justice problems.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Running through some stale tabs, gumby makes pretty much the same point a few days ago regards a flatfile addressbook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27442335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27442335

kr99x 5y ago

No, no information should ever be banned from any public/commons - the end. You want to ban certain information from a particular place you control? Go nuts. The wider public? No. The power to ban information is too great to be entrusted to any authority at all. Depending on how thorough the "ban" (web text filter at the ISP level? mandatory AR implants at birth filtering banned content? worse?), it's anywhere from an abhorrent violation of human rights and the principles behind free exchange and scientific inquiry all the way up through literally the most powerful weapon which could even theoretically be designed. This is not a road worth going down, for any amount of harm reduction. The cost today may be worth it. The cost long term is potentially too great to even consider risking. There is no guarantee of who holds the ban hammer tomorrow.

dkokelley 5y ago
Thanks for sharing. Do you think there is ever a scenario where information should be censored from the public at large? (Child porn, or you or your family getting ‘doxxed’, for example) I appreciate the take that the future harm isn’t worth the benefit today, since we’d enable future arbiters to control what is available. There’s nuance in determining what is a public sphere vs. a privately controlled platform. The places with the most distribution are currently private, but crypto could change that to where we collectively own the platform, effectively making it publicly owned. Does that change your thoughts on when censorship is appropriate?
- mcbits 5y ago
  Nobody ever argued that molecules of air and ink have some duty to participate in enforcing laws prohibiting various types of speech and the press, I guess because it was never possible. Bits and bytes are rapidly supplanting ink and air for many types of communication, and they do make it possible to censor those communications at a deeper level than ever before. So I guess the question is, how does the use of this new power to suppress abuses of speech weigh against other forms of abuse that become available to those who wield this power?
- kr99x 5y ago
  I think there's lots of information that should be censored, and if I were made data czar of the world I would surely not be corrupt and do a diligent and thoughtful job removing only what must be removed for the good of the world. But I would not trust any corporation (sometimes it's profitable to remove something so they retain control of some market) or government (sometimes it secures their power to keep people unaware of some facts about their actions) to do the same. Would you?

summerlight 5y ago

To add more data points for your point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case Everyone, please DO NOT underestimate people's malicious will to abuse weak minority groups having un-moderated platforms as their primary tool. Due to lack of Telegram's basic moderation, those victims had been severely abused to the unrecoverable level, more than two years. This could've been at least mitigated if they simply closed the room based on user reporting, which they refused to do so.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

meekmind 5y ago

> The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin Do they? Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Having a centralized arbiter of truth is more dangerous to the truth than bad people who do bad things.

devenblake 5y ago
> Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either. Tell that to folks doing web archival.
- meekmind 5y ago
  They're both distributed. The fact that anyone _can_ archive anything forever reasonably excludes the assumption that it's not, accessibility/curation notwithstanding.

throwitaway1235 5y ago

It's simple. The user is a thinking, conscious being, he or she views, what he or she wants. No dilemma. Nothing shall be censored.

anamexis 5y ago
So if someone posts revenge porn of you, you're fine just trusting the 8 billion people on Earth not to look at it, and leaving it at that?

jazzyjackson 5y ago

> How does that work on a blockchain? Since none of us are the operator in the matrix, we're not looking at the raw bytes of the blockchain, we're always using some view layer over the data. So the view layer can choose to not see the content of some block. This could be done by having community operated blocklists to the effect of "you don't want to know what's at these locations" - you can't take back what's been said on chain, but you can cover your ears.

foxrider 5y ago

The honest answer here is that I don't trust any authority to be the "authority on information" and to be able to decide what I may or may not be able to see. I expect the search engine to be a search engine and not an "allowed material" repository. History shows that an authority on anything would be abused sooner or later and if you live in a totalitarian country the technical ability to censor information is the last thing you want anyone having

concordDance 5y ago

> Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain? My answer is No. The "genuinely harmful content" is minimally harmful compared to the damage censorship can do. The problem is always with people being dicks, not the information. E.g. a jilted lover posting porn videoes of an ex is only a problem because the lover will deliberately attempt to show them to the ex and the ex's social contacts (and even that is only harmful because some people are judgemental bastards. Yes, some people like scat, get over it), so target the lover with harassment charges rather than making the information distribution illegal. I'm a bit of a freedom of information purist, I think a world with 0 censorship would be better than the current one, as the censors will always be tempted to censor more and more things to advance their interests. The maximum badness from zero censorship is much much lower than the maximum badness with censorship.

poutrathor 5y ago
what is lacking in your view is empathy. It seems you don't understand what it is to be the victim, for no good damn fault of you. Moreover in your 'solution', once the videos have leaked on-line to fulfil the ex-lover revenge, it will never be taken out. Fast forward 10 years later, the ex-lover has served its sentence, the victim moved to another place, another job, every thing is forgotten. At their work, they got into a heated debate about any topic. The adversarial debater, seeing red, searched the web, find the video and broadcast to everybody. There might be regrets the second after sending, but it's too late, *once again* It's not about people being dicks it's about information as weapons laying around forever. Humans have built-in forgetness but modern days tech does not. Since we are evolving at nature rate, technology must be rein in from time to time.
- concordDance 5y ago
  I admit I do struggle to understand that type of victimhood. Probably because my social circle would not care about whatever obscure fetishes I have unless it's kiddy diddling, nor would most even want to see my sex tape (and I'd struggle to care if they had). However, people are quite capable of being very unpleasant to eachother without sex videos, if it wasn't that the person seeing red would have done something else (keyed car, sabotage, malicious lies... plenty of options). Regardless they should be disciplined, probably fired outright.

mikestaub 5y ago

Mastodon handles this almost perfectly. No one can take down an ActivityPub server, but moderators can choose to not sync with hostile actors. If the users disagree with the moderator's decision, they migrate to another host and take all their data with them.